No, Parents and Teachers Protesting Racial Injustice Are Not the Same as the Proud Boys
As an African-American man and a longtime racial justice organizer and advocate, being compared to a white supremacist Trump-supporting insurrectionist doesn’t sit well. And yet, an East Bay Times op-ed from former Oakland school board member James Harris does just that. In it, Harris compares a group of parents (myself included), elementary school students, and teachers who peacefully protested at school board meetings to the mob of white supremacists who stormed the United States capitol killing five people, including police officers.
When we protested at the Oakland school board meeting on October 23rd, 2019, it was the parents and teachers who got hurt by the school police, not the other way around. It is us who are suing the district for their treatment of parents and teachers not us who have charges filed against us. But it isn’t just being compared to violent actors but also white supremacist ones that bothers me so deeply. Racial injustice led me to protest in the first place. I learned that Oakland Unified School District planned to closed a number of schools, including my daughters’ at about the same time I learned that Alameda County planned to spend seventy-five million dollars on a brand-new probation camp to detain young people. The same kids who have been hurt first and worst by school closures are also the ones most likely to find themselves involved in the juvenile injustice system. We rejected the idea that Oakland doesn’t have resources to educate Black and brown kids, when they have resources to lock them up.
That my daughters’ school was on the chopping block was additional motivation to fight the school board’s plans. Seeing school closures across Oakland, felt like watching a long cascade of falling dominoes, all part of a larger efforts to eliminate public schools and replace them with charter schools. Those charter schools serve less Black children and less children with special needs. And so, when the domino is about to fall on you and your kids, you take notice in a different way, because you know you can either be knocked over or you can stand up.
This is the work I have been doing all of my adult life, advocating for the closure of youth prisons and the funding of education systems and employment opportunities that repair the harms done to Black and Brown people. I have been a part of some incredible victories that involved direct-action and civil disobedience. We helped stop what would have been the largest per-capita juvenile hall from being built here in Alameda County. While some may feel civil disobedience is too disruptive or too distracting, I ignore them because I know it works and that it has been a principal vehicle in the advance of civil and human rights.
That’s why on October 23rd 2019 I jumped over a metal barricade erected by the school board at their meeting. We refused to be intimidated by the metal barricades and the phalanx of school police that stood behind them. We had arrived at that meeting as we always had with our kids in tow, with our (sometimes holiday themed) song sheets, pizza, and snacks to make it through long school board meetings. Why would we bring our kids if we planned a violent confrontation with the police? In fact, it was us who were met with violence: a first-grade teacher was knocked to the ground; a parent had their ribs cracked; and my wife had her knee torn up, all by the school police. Not a single board member or police officer was injured. After a lot of public pressure by the Black Organizing Project, James Harris actually voted to remove school police from Oakland schools and to disband the same police force that beat us up. Yet, James Harris wants people to believe that we are the Trump insurrectionists.
Especially in a democratically controlled area like the Bay Area, it is important that we be able to draw distinctions not just between republicans and democrats but also between conservative democrats and progressives. Trump and the neo-confederate dictatorship that he sought to install is clear. But the conservative wing of the Democratic party and who and what they represent should also be clarified. When it seemed that a more progressive member of the party like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might defeat Joe Biden, the Democratic establishment began to prop up Michael Bloomberg.
Billionaires like Michael Bloomberg dominate the conservative wing of the democratic party. They aren’t many people that rich but they wield enormous political power, a greedy few that drive racial and class divisions among working people and poor people to advance their own power and interests. Bloomberg advocated for stop and frisk in New York and funds the charter school industry nationally as part of a larger neoliberal agenda to privatize public education. But one doesn’t have to be a billionaire to be beholden to the agenda, as James Harris shows. Part of what this part of the party does is enforce austerity. When the same county that is planning to build a new youth detention facility says the board must make education cuts, the school board doesn’t ask how those cuts will impact families, they ask how much should we cut?
In claiming that we are the violent ones rather than the actions of the school board and the now defunct Oakland school police department, Harris is choosing to side with billionaires rather than the students, parents and teachers. Harris had already chosen sides, when he funded his campaign almost exclusively through donations from the charter industry.
Closing public schools is racial injustice. Every public-school closure is a blow to racial and economic justice. School closures have facilitated the gentrification of Oakland and the displacement of Black people. Closing a school like Kaiser elementary, a multiracial cross-class school with a lower achievement gap for African American students than most Oakland schools (charter and public), was racial injustice. It was another domino falling. We may have not have been successful in stopping the closure of Kaiser but we have been successful overall.
Despite getting physically beat up, our small group is part of a longline of parents, students, and teachers that have fought school closures. Our work has contributed to a larger successful movement:
There have been no new school closures or mergers since Kaiser’s closure.
We supported efforts by the Free Our Kids Coalition to defeat the proposal to build a new probation camp costing seventy-five million dollars.
We brought suit against the district for its treatment of parents and teachers on October 23, 2019.
We helped contribute to efforts that brought in a new slate of school board members who understand that permanent public-school closures are racial injustice.
Many believed that the same charter industry contributions that funded James Harris’ campaign would determine the most recent round of Oakland School Board candidate elections. They were wrong. For the most part, Oaklanders roundly rejected the candidates supported by the charter school industry. This is a new day in Oakland and the advocates of school privatization know it. Their brand of politics has failed as this global pandemic has made it even clearer: we can’t rely on billionaires nor the markets they manipulate to ensure safety let alone equitable opportunity. We need robust public health infrastructure to survive intersecting public health, climate, and economic crisis. Public schools are a critical part of that infrastructure.
This new school board has an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. Getting police out of Oakland schools was a first step. The new school board should vote to support reparations for Black students and to put an end to the blueprint process that led to so many school closures and so much harm. The district should acknowledge and apologize for the harm done on October 23rd, 2019 but we aren’t holding our breath. We march on. In partnership with other organizations, we just helped pull together a townhall to fight school closures and over 100 people attended in the middle of a pandemic. Three new school board members attended. Parents, teachers, students and community members will continue to fight (nonviolently) to demand that school board members that stand with them, rather than with monied interests.